Page 2

But Subodh Bapat, chief technology officer of Suns Volume System Products Group, said Sun has had a presence in the low end for years, having introduced a 1U (1.75-inch-high) server in 1997.
"Its not just the midrange and high-end markets that Sun has been a player in," Bapat said in an interview with eWEEK. "Weve always been players [in the low end]. We believe in addressing all segments of the market, from the low end to the high end, with [a Solaris] operating system that spans the entire range."

Suns Throughput Computing chip strategywhich is aimed at maximizing the total amount of work done by a processoralso will play into the low-end push, by enabling more work to be done in a smaller footprint, he said. Sun also is working to strengthen the backplane performance of its rack-mount server architecture, with enhanced networking and management planes, and improve upon the software stack and provisioning capabilities of the systems.

"This is what is going to be the differentiators [for Sun] going forward," Bapat said.
Suns second generations of blades and backplane fabric are due next year, with greater connectivity to storage-area networks, speed bumps and InfiniBand capabilities, he said.